I think of regexes like I think of code modules that hide abstractions: they should be described via documentation, interfaces, and tests. You generally should

I think of regexes like I think of code modules that hide abstractions: they should be described via documentation, interfaces, and tests. You generally should not need to read/parse the regex to understand what it does. I think regular expressions are very useful, but trying to push too much parsing work into them is how you end up with unreadable code.